REWINDING THE NUCLEAR CLOCK:
TODAY WE LOOK AT BUSH'S DECISION TO BACK OUT OF A DISARMAMENT AGREEMENT, RESUME UNDERGROUND NUCLEAR TESTING, AND TURN AN ANCIENT VOLCANO INTO THE NATION'S NUCLEAR DUMP
Dan Coughlin
Pacifica National Board Meeting
January 13, 2002

While the Pacifica Campaign and other free speech radio activists were preparing to make history last week, the Bush Administration was busy trying to undo history. Following other moves to bring the country back to an earlier, more war-like era, the administration set about rewinding the nuclear clock, erasing some of the fragile gains made by the anti-nuclear movement over the last few decades.

The rewind began in earnest on Tuesday, when the Administration published its annual Nuclear Posture Review. In the document, the President announced that he did not intend to destroy some 4000 nuclear warheads, as Bush had promised Russian President Vladmir Putin in their arms talks in November. Instead, he declared that the United States would de-activate and then store the weapons, effectively putting them on hold for a later date. The announcement has only further incensed the Russians, who were already angered by the administration's decision to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty just weeks ago.

At the same time, and in the same document, the administration also raised the possibility that it would resume underground nuclear testing in the years ahead. The United States has refrained from such tests since 1992, when Bush senior placed a moratorium on underground explosions. Up until that point, the government had launched regular underground tests at the Nevada Test Site, an infamous sprawl of nuclear and conventional weapons laboratories as well as waste storage facilities in the middle of Shoshone Nation lands. Should tests resume, the administration would be in violation not only of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty but also the 1863 Ruby Valley Treaty with the Shoshone.

But last week's nuclear back-pedaling did not stop there. On Thursday, the Secretary of the Department of Energy, Spencer Abraham, formally recommended that Yucca Mountain, in Nevada, be used to bury thousands of tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste. Arguing that national security after Sept. 11 required a safe storage site, Abraham put an end to the years' long search for a super, one-stop nuclear dump, capable of storing the nation's waste. Yucca Mountain is an ancient volcano that lies in the heart of Shoshone territory, just 90 miles from Las Vegas. It has long been considered a sacred site by the Shoshone.

Guest:

Susi Snyder, Program Manager, Shundahai Network. Susi Snyder was recently declared a Las Vegas Hero by the local City Weekly paper for her work to shut down the Nevada Test Site. She spent 10 days in jail this year for organizing a blockade of the test site to protest the subcritical nuclear weapons tests, and she chained herself to the overhang above the main entrance to the Las Vegas Federal Building in 1998 to protest the nuclear weapons programs.

Ian Zabarte, Secretary of State for the Western Shoshone National Council which has always opposed U.S. nuclear programs and the military occupation of their lands. He lives at Cactus Springs Nevada, which is about 18 miles from the Nevada Test Site. Alice Slater, Director, Global Resource and Action Center for the Environment. She is on the Board of directors of the Global Network to Keep Space for Peace and the U.S. Nuclear Abolition Campaign.

Observation
How can we trust any government agency that has proven time and again that they continually lie and deceive the American People at every level?
We must consider all of their actions, or lack of, as a course for concern when dealing with matters and issues such as the Yucca Mountain Project.
Here is another one of their great deals....

FERC Removes Web Page
About Holes in Montana Dam
By The Associated Press
12.28.02

MISSOULA, Mont. — The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has removed a document from its Web site that revealed officials found foot-wide gaps in a portion of the aging Milltown Dam upstream from here.

Instead, the Web site now contains a notice that anyone wishing to view the information must file a request with the agency through the federal Freedom of Information Act.

The agency did not explain the reason behind the change, and a spokesman did not return a phone call seeking comment on Dec. 24.

The one-page document was on the agency's Web site as late as Dec. 20. It revealed that an engineer with Northwestern Energy, which owns the dam, called the FERC twice on Oct. 25 to report that company officials had found gaps between the bottom of the dam's concrete spillway and its earthen foundation.

An engineer said the gaps could be filled with grout, and a NorthWestern spokeswoman, Claudia Rapkoch, said the dam was "safe and structurally sound."

Missoula County commissioners, however, were upset that they were never told about the problem. They learned of it only after a county employee came across the document on FERC's Web site last week.

Commissioners sent a written complaint to the agency on Dec. 20, after a FERC engineer said he could not discuss the gaps because of "national security." By Dec. 23, the document had been removed from FERC's Web site.

Peter Nielsen, environmental health supervisor at Missoula's City-County Health Department, said FERC was improperly withholding information.

"After Sept. 11, FERC put the clamps on certain things so terrorists could not get in there and get diagrams to Grand Coulee," he said. "But we are not Grand Coulee.

"Our downtown is five miles downstream from this dam, and we are in fact threatened by this structure. The citizens of Missoula have a concern for their public health, safety and welfare, and we are having information withheld from us."

The dam and its Milltown Reservoir are the terminus of the nation's largest Superfund environmental cleanup site, the resting place for decades of mine waste that washed 120 miles down the Clark Fork River from Butte and Anaconda.

The Environmental Protection Agency currently is considering options for cleaning up the contamination and dealing with the dam, which was built in 1907. Missoula and Missoula County officials support removing dam entirely, cleaning up the contaminated sediment and returning the area to its natural state.

Shundahai Network
Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force
Public Citizen
Nuclear Information & Resource Service

For more information contact: 702 369-2730 or

Lisa Gue
Lisa_gue@citizen.org
Senior Energy Analyst
Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy & Environment Program
215 Pennsylvania Ave. SE
Washington, DC 20003
ph: (202) 454-5130; fax: (202) 547-7392
www.citizen.org/cmep

The Banality of Nuclear Evil
by Ana Simo
March 13, 2002

Most New Yorkers are not scrambling out on their roofs to look at the twin shafts of light now gracing the Lower Manhattan night sky. The bluish shafts of light, a memorial to the almost 3,000 people killed on 9/11 at the World Trade Center, may play well in Peoria or Tokyo, but many in their vicinity can't wait for them to be turned off.

New Yorkers want their city back. Their scant attention to the public 9/11 commemorations, in spite of the predictable media barrage, is a sign of civic health. Of things finally having gone back to normal. This most pragmatic, impatient of cities chafes at its assigned role in a national morality play scripted in Washington.

For the first time in memory, otherwise liberal New Yorkers are rooting for the famously greedy local real estate interests, hoping they'll save the city from a maudlin, tourist-infested, Soviet-style monument to the WTC fallen, a stone's throw from Alexander Hamilton's suitably modest tomb. The possibility of a "tasteful" Soho-style monument — like the Batcaveish shafts of light — is not getting any better reviews.

There was a toxic aspect to Monday's mid-year ceremonies in New York and Washington that did not escape many New Yorkers, especially those who had to learn to live with the sights and smells of the Ground Zero graveyard. The dead, and the living remembering them, have been turned into patriotic symbols fueling a war without end, without boundaries, and, if nuclear weapons are rendered as banal as the Pentagon now wishes, also without bounds.

Real people died because the attackers saw the Trade Center only as a symbol of American power, and not also as two gigantically ugly architectural clumps where tiny human beings toiled for a living. Washington and a relentlessly patriotic media quickly appropriated the symbolism, sugar-coated it with a big dose of all-American sentimentality and individualism (witness the well-meaning bios of each of the WTC dead published by The New York Times), and turned it against the attackers — past, present, and future, real or imagined.

As Pearl Harbor begat Hiroshima and Nagasaki (some 200,000 human beings pulverized or otherwise snuffed), the 9/11 dead might beget death in an even more horrific and global scale — this time, not just abroad, but also right here, in this country, even in this city.

The escalation won't come from terrorists, who may or may not explode a "dirty" bomb in Grand Central Station that will contaminate Manhattan for decades, but from the U.S., which is considering the unthinkable: to use nuclear weapons to actually fight wars, and not as a deterrent. And to use them against both nuclear and nonnuclear countries. In other words, to smash the taboo against using nuclear weapons that has kept Armageddon at bay since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The blueprint for disaster is the Pentagon's Nuclear Posture Review, a secret, 56-page report leaked last weekend to The Los Angeles Times that recommends drastic changes both in the purpose of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and the circumstances in which it would be used.

The Pentagon wants to develop new, smaller nuclear weapons that it can actually use, not just threaten to use. Nuclear weapons, it says, "could be employed against targets able to withstand non-nuclear attack (for example, deep underground bunkers or bio-weapons facilities)" or to respond to what it vaguely describes as "surprising military developments," a chillingly open-ended phrase.

Nuclear weapons would not be anymore a category onto themselves, but part of a conventional-nuclear weapons continuum, a panoply of arms at the disposal of the U.S. President.

In plain language, this means bringing down the firewall now separating conventional weapons from nuclear weapons, and banalizing nuclear weapons, by making them smaller — though not less lethal — more flexible, easier and more tempting to use.

It also means dumping the current U.S. nuclear doctrine, first articulated by Eisenhower's Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles on January 12, 1954, that sees nuclear weapons as a "deterrent of massive retaliatory power" against nuclear attack, to be used only as a last resort.

For decades, until the demise of the Soviet Union, the world's security was assured by the "balance of terror" between the then two superpowers, the knowledge that whoever launched a nuclear attack first would be destroyed in turn. The old "assured mutual destruction" has now been replaced in the Pentagon's thinking with "assured unilateral destruction" of any country the United States sees as threatening its security, not just with nuclear weapons, but also with any other type of weapons of mass destruction or "surprising military developments."

The moment the U.S. begins developing, and testing, this new, Strangelovian array of so-called "boutique" nuclear weapons, ending the underground testing moratorium in place since 1992, all bets will be off worldwide on nuclear disarmament and anti-proliferation. In fact, the very moment the Pentagon's proposals become policy, a virulent global arms race will begin. Not just a two or, at the most, five-way one, as during the increasingly quaint Cold War, but a 10, 12, 15-way nuclear arms race, with many of today's conventional weapon-hungry developing countries aspiring to prestigious nuclear-tipped bunker-busters.

The Administration's specious song and dance of the last few days, denying that the Pentagon report says what it says and means what it says, only adds to the uncertainty. There's a tectonic policy shift in the works that could end life on earth. Is it a done deal? With a lame Congress, a stratospheric approval rate, and a sense that God put him on earth to protect America against her enemies, Bush may well have already tilted the Pentagon way.

Not to worry. The blue shafts of light of the World Trade Center memorial will still be visible in another galaxy ten million years from now to tell the story of the Pax Americana gone awry, even if no humans are left. New York may still have the last laugh.